Hunted(44)

“So what am I hunting today?” Yeva asked, a million imagined images flashing before her eyes. She thought of the glass wing tips still clinging to the window frame in the long, shattered hallway.

The Beast’s lips pulled back, and Yeva could not decide whether it was a smile or a snarl. “Today,” he said, “you will be hunting me.”

Yeva felt like throwing her bow down in frustration. After three days of hunting the Beast, she could find no trace of him until he appeared close to sundown to bring her back to the castle. She knew now that it had to be magic, and her thoughts screamed at the unfairness of it. After all, she was human. Only a girl with a bow and a pair of strong arms and eyes. And none of those things could help her when tracking a magical creature through a forest that, for her, held only squirrels and deer and jays.

She’d been so sure this was a step toward achieving what she needed to do, that learning to track the Beast would be part of learning how to kill him. But that seemed farther away than ever, now that she knew how truly impossible it was to get the advantage on him.

The Beast was as frustrated as she was. She could read it in the gathering tension in his voice each day when he ended the hunt by revealing himself to her. So when, on the fourth day, he appeared early—no more than an hour or two after midday—Yeva’s heart flickered with a beat of panic. Was she to be punished?

But the Beast merely sat there, appearing from behind a tree as she walked. He stared at her, contemplatively, and for once, Yeva refused to let the stare unsettle her. Instead she stared back, fingering the fletching on the arrow she kept nocked to her bow.

“Come,” the Beast said finally.

“Come where?” Yeva asked warily.

“Here, to me.”

Yeva didn’t move, only gripped the bow more tightly and eyed the Beast sidelong, swallowing down fear.

The Beast’s brows lifted. “I will not harm you.”

“Your word?” Yeva asked.

“My word.”

Yeva’s hands shook as she returned the arrow to her quiver, and she stepped closer to the Beast. She stopped when she was near enough to feel the heat of his fur in the cold, near enough to smell that wild smell and see the flecks of red that gave his gold eyes their hue.

The Beast inclined his head, a melding of nod and bow that left Yeva more confused than before—a courtly gesture, so familiar from her time among the baronessa’s retinue, but so alien from this creature. “Turn around.”

Yeva did as he asked, though every nerve in her body told her not to turn her back on him, told her that she was mad to let such a predator so near.

She heard the Beast move closer behind her, and a warm paw came to rest in the center of her back. She suppressed the urge to shiver, certain at any moment she’d feel his claws. Instead she heard his voice.

“Close your eyes and listen.” His voice was very quiet, and despite the vast open wood all around, his words felt intimate, private. Yeva thought that even if someone were standing a few paces away, they wouldn’t hear him. It was as though he was speaking directly into her ears. “Tell me what you hear.”

“I hear you,” Yeva replied. When that got no response, she took a long, slow breath and let her attention move outward. It was difficult to listen with the reminder of the Beast right behind her, but as the sounds of the forest settled into the quiet she almost forgot about his touch.

“I hear jays,” she whispered. “Calling to one another. There is a wind some ways to the east, making the trees sigh against each other, but it’s not coming our way. Snow sliding from a branch.”

“Is that all?”

Yeva, eyes closed, felt her brows knit. “What else am I supposed to hear?”

“Listen.”

Yeva listened. She listened until her ears started to ring in the quiet. She was about to speak, and drew breath to tell him she heard nothing, when something made her stop. The skin at the back of her neck prickled, and not from the Beast’s presence. She felt her head turn, making the prickling stronger. “I hear . . .” Her thoughts emptied as she tried to name the sensation. Something was pulling at her, drawing her attention northwest, and it was a sound. Except it wasn’t a sound, at the same time. “I hear . . . music.”

The Beast’s breath caught, then started again. “Music?” he repeated, sounding surprised.

“I can’t describe . . .” Yeva’s ears strained. It wasn’t music, not really. But her mind could not interpret it any other way, this feeling, this sweeping, rhythmic pulse that kept drawing her attention off through the woods. “It calls to me the way music does.”

“Music,” the Beast echoed again, his voice low and musing, almost wondrous. “That is not what I hear.”

“What do you hear?”

“That is not important. For now, just concentrate on the sound.”

Yeva wanted to know the answer to her question, but she wanted to listen to the music more. Though the sensation was new and alien, it also felt strangely familiar. I’ve heard this sound before, she realized, her entire body tingling. She’d caught glimpses of it, like a distant haunting refrain, in her deepest moments of silence in the wood. When the long days stretched timelessly on, and her mind emptied of thoughts until there was only her footsteps in the snow, only the feel of the bow in her hand, the bite of cold on her cheeks. When everything else faded away, this sound was what was left.